All Night You Dream of Ice and In the Morning Wake to a Skiff of Snow

After all these weeks of rain and gray, the sky a fitted sheet on the too bulky mattress of mass, last night there were white blossoms in the trees and snow on the earth and your hair grew long and light-filled and you rode through town on a polar bear.

Who knows what dreams mean when the body is this white waxing flesh or white waning flesh, pale or bright and orbiting with only borrowed light to see by: Who are you? Where are you from? Why are you here, sailing my dreams, reminding me of the disorder of desire?

In the morning, the children and I watch the turkeys march through the trees, the chickadees eating seed in the feeder, and my three year old son studies the Forest Service poster of mushrooms I’ve hung by the kitchen table to replace the poster of butterflies I hung to replace the poster of birds. He tells me how he’s the giant puffball, his sister the fairy ring, and I, he says, I’m the edible one—the one in the upper corner, farthest from Smokey in his Forest Service hat, his amber eyes and the caption that reads Please beneath his floating cranium.

If I were a healthy sort of person, this—my son making a family of fungi—would turn me to joyful mush, but instead it makes me sad, sad mush.

I am trying so hard not to desire, I am trying to be more like a pill, or any other drug, or a mind, drugged and pilled, or a forest, not burning, or a mushroom, existing.

Did you know that if you unfold the cerebral hemispheres, each takes up about 1.3 square feet? I think of a brain quilt, laid on the floor like a game of Twister, the neural pathways tangled like a child’s arms in his mother’s arms. We all fall down.

Looking at the fluid filled ventricles and ganglia, the maps of the routes to sensation, I think of vines growing up a wall or tree roots underground. Which are we? Which are we not? Playing a game of Twister, we trick the body into the sensations of sideways and upside down, the realities of friction and gravity. My son tries to fall down, he’s happy to fall, he has no idea how one area of the cerebellum sends a note to another: we’re having fun!, has no metacognitive level that says we’re pretending to have fun!

I am the edible mushroom and any polar bear is a warrior polar bear and there is no shame in dream.

If you drug the brain, the neurotransmitters, little brain boats carrying messages, aren’t reabsorbed back into the tissues.

Instead they rest in the gap between synapses. Imagine that: having nothing to do, sitting still. Imagine not longing, reimagine learning as the roots growing or the leaves making their chlorophyll. The light shines and you absorb energy from light. Or you’re fungi, extracting energy from the bonds of other organic compounds. Or you’re my son, at three. Who was I? Where was I from? Why are we here? I can’t answer my own questions. I won’t. I’m going to try to stay in my dream as the light slowly moves across it.

This week I went to an art show where a woman depicted her opened heart as a shock of leaves. Is if for sale?, I wanted to know. Her hair was silver and the matte in the space around the art was white. It was not for sale.

About Maya Jewell Zeller

Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of Rust Fish and YESTERDAY, THE BEES. She serves as poetry editor for Scablands Books, as fiction editor for Crab Creek Review, and as Assistant Professor for Central Washington University. Learn more at mayajewellzeller.com; follow Maya on Twitter @MayaJZeller.